But a sure method of determining how far along the road to recovery you are is how good or bad the food tastes. If it tastes good, you’re not much better, but if it tastes bad, you’ll be outta there in no time.

I’ve been carrying out my “vigil” for you Tim. I’m not a religious man so it actually just involves me drinking lots and lots of beer and getting sunburnt. Some may laugh at my mysterious ways but they seem to be having a positive effect! I shall continue my vigil for another 24 hours in the knowledge and belief that every beer counts.

Determining how far along the road to recovery you are has always been measured in my family by whether they’ve given you back your knickers. Once you get your knickers back you know you’re getting better.

LGF is having a running snark-fight with some right-wing groups in Europe. As we found here, when One Nation was winning votes, you cannot keep the lid on reactions to things like immigration - particularly when the immigrants are really objectionable.
Howard stole some of their clothes, and I think Sarcozy rode to victory doing something similar.
It’s all very well to say those ultra-right wing groups are a worry, which they are. But to defuse them you have to toughen up a bit on the things which give them a free kick. Immigration involving unassimilable, ungrateful, separatist-minded but ultimately dysfunctional sub-groups is guaranteed to steer votes towards the ultra-right if there’s no other party making right-ish noises.LGF

Our Beer
Which cometh in bottles
Hallowed be thy ale
Thy will be drunk
I will be drunk
At home as we are in the pub
Give us each day our daily beverage
And forgive us our spillages
As we forgive those who spillest against us
And lead us not into poofy winebars or detract us from real ale
For mine is the lager, the draught and the bitter
Forever and ever

And, yea verily, the arm was upright, and although hairy, it was vertically extended in the true manner of a Bay 13 Collingwood supporter giving the finger to all lesser mortals and/or demanding another bottle of expensive wine.

And thus did the multitudes rejoice, and shout aloud and crack tinnies en masse and wave their joyous symbol aloft in celebration.

And eeniemeenie at #45 spake unto the multitudes, and his speech was true and vanquished the Non Believers and the hordes from the vile heretics of the Screwtop cult into the everlasting darkness of Balmain or Byron Bay. <ratbag mode off>

To amuse Tim during breaks in the cricket we have commenced the saga of MoonBatMan. All are invited to contribute…

It was a dark and stormy night. MoonBatMan, head inclined at a rakish angle, gunned the MoonBatmobile, and dropped a trail of flying rubber fragments as he swept through the sleeping city to the smoke-filled cellar where the Tilting Knights of the Windmill assembled. He took the chair and savoured the evocative aroma of hash fumes and ancient plumbing. Traceeee was perched on the edge of her seat, her mole-like eyes sparkling in the light from the fluorescent globe. And Margrot, emboldened by the redolent air and her recent purchases of bargain-priced second hand fonts, could hardly sit still as they discussed their dastardly plan—a giant effigy of a rodent was to be winched onto the topmost sail of the Opera House and set on fire at one minute to midnight on New Year’s Eve.

But the best-laid plans of mice and Tilting Knights can go pear-shaped
It wasn’t long before they had fragmented into warring factions.

“But the carbon…”
“Little Johnny isn’t in Government any more…”
“I thought of it first!”
“Do we have clearance from the Gurrigal tribe?”
“Will the rodent be made of biodegradable materials?”
“What about the environmental impact statement?”

MoonBatMan tilted alarmingly and looked to Phatty for help.

“Comrades, we must have consensus and solidarity!” boomed Phatty holding aloft an Egyptian golden sceptre that also doubled as a hippo’s toothpick. “The vanguard must be united against the forces of darkness.”

The Knights stood in a tight circle, elbows touching to form a ring of power. Heads tilted in unison, they experienced the tenth level of happiness. Then forgetting all plans, purposes, and momentarily shedding all bad feelings, they turned to sipping chai lattes and discussion of the joyous prospect of reducing emissions by 90% by the year 2009.

#68; Alas, Moonbatman and Traceee insisted on demanding the complete extermination of the human race and Phatty had to lock them up in the Vats of Compassion and then? Tune in next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel!

#65 Blogstrop, one of the problems in Europe is that it seems to be only the far-right parties that are addressing the immigrant ‘problems’, as we most quaintly and euphemistically label them.

The left (of all stripes), centrist and soft right parties aren’t addressing those at all.

I haven’t spent much time following what’s happening over there, but the LGF/Gates of Vienna & Brussels Journal stoush is fascinating. I know people on both sides of the debate, and they all have valid points.

I don’t know how it’ll turn out in Europe, but I suspect the next 3-4 years are going to be very interesting to watch.

Which reminds me. We had a rather entertaining discussion here last year about jell-o, jelly, and so forth. What do they serve in Australian hospitals, if you don’t have jell-o? Jell-o is the quintessential hospital food, after all.

You know how you’ll be watching the news on TV or reading the newspaper, and you’ll catch a story about some actor, and you say to yourself, “Gosh, is he still alive?” This is the most extreme case of the phenomenon I’ve ever experienced.

Tim, Thank god you are OK, I will go to the off licence on my way home from work tommorow and toast your victory over the ‘Darned cancer thingy’,with a four pack of 4xxxx and engage in whatever stereotyped Aussie language and behaviour i can think of, Might even watch a few clips of ‘Skippy’ on Youtube while i’m ‘sinking a few tinnys’, followed by Crocodile Dundee 2 on the DVD.

#65 Blogstrop, don’t just rely on LGF on this issue. Are the Vlaams Belang racist?

There is a traditional Waloon/Flemish hostility in Belgium, and withthe influx of francophone & muslim immigrants tipping the balance to the francophones, the flemish are pissed off. I don’t think they are advocating the policies of the British National Party, which is[/i ]openly racist and has fascist tendancies.

The Belgian government is dominated by the Waloons and has an interest in isolatiing Vlaams Belang, so I would be a little skeptical.

That Vlaams Belang (like their predecessor, Vlaams Blok), is still demanding a full pardon for all Flemish Nazi collaborators is more than a little troubling. Yes, they are quite cozy with the BNP, if not in an official capacity, and even more so with the equally repulsive French National Front.

David Duke has disassociated himself from the Klu Klux Klan, but that doesn’t change what he is. I think the anti-Islamization movement needs to disassociate itself from the Vlaams Belang. I don’t think for a moment that the choice is between aligning with neo-Nazis and their sympathizers, and doing nothing. In doing so, when the general public associate “opposing Islamization” with White Power skinheads, slick race-baiters and unrepentent Nazis, what will the movement have accomplished?

#117 Spiny is right that anti-islamists need to disassociate from neo-nazi movements, that is what LGF has been saying.
The problem, as I see it, is that when wimpy European governments adopt dhimmitude and give in to the islamists, they are fostering support for any anti-islamists, nazi overtones or not.

I think you all are missing the larger issue of copyright infringement. “Walloon” is the product name of the inflatable cubicles manufactured by Paco Industries. And “Flemish” is damned close to “Phlegmish”, our over-the-counter expectorant. Belgium better have a good attorney.

I’m glad they saved the arm, but really, was there any trouble with the arm? My impression was that the epicenter of all the trouble was…elsewhere.

Anyway, great news, and prayers continue.

As for the Belgians, well, why doesn’t somebody split it in two - Flanders to the Netherlands and Wallonia to the French. Dunno about Brussels. Maybe they can hold a soccer match or something and the loser takes
the city.

Timbo, thank goodness you’re on the mend - I’ve been drinking for you as well as me ever since you went off the ether to chat up the nurses; I need a break from the booze, at least for half a day or so. Watch out lefties !!

#139: “Hell, no, boy, this batch ‘a corn mash ain’t riddy yit! See that thar rat paddlin’ aroun’ in it? Way-ul, when he drowndz and sinks down to the bottom, then this h’yar stuff’ll be fit to swaller.” - Cousin Virgil

BTW, Tim, while you’re on the mend, this is a good time to think about your financial future. I invite you to consider setting up a retirement fund with Paco Investments (Cayman Islands). We’ve just hired one of the sharpest minds in the business as Vice President of our Funds Management unit.

#117 Spiny, no, one certainly shouldn’t allign oneself with neo-nazis to fight islamo-fascism; that would be kinda nonsensical.

I don’t know enough about Vlaams belang and know how the terms racist and fascist are thrown around willy-nilly by the left to shut up opponents. Is this happening with VB or are they alligned with the BNP or Front National? I don’t know.

Vlaams Belang is not aligned with the BNP in any “official” capacity, but the leaders of both groups are certainly on friendly terms; their relationship with Le Pen and the National Front, however, is very much out in the open: they announced they are joining up with other like-minded groups to form a pan-European “patriotic party”.

#148 Spiny, I just read about that somewhere else and the relationship of the NF and VB was not clear; perhaps not a good sign.

In Canada, we have a similarly based racial, regional, separatist party, the Bloq Quebecois. They take great pains to officially stress they are not “racist” and do “outreach” to “minority communities”.

However, I do believe they get a bit of an easy ride from the MSM and establishment as they are “socialist” in orientation, rather than rightist.

Great to learn that things are going well Tim and that you are only an arms length from recovery!!!- It’s about time too, so many toasts in the good stuff and now down to the cask and all of us collectively with liver damage - we need you to return to save us from ourselves.
Thank goodness AB is back- sneaky little chap crept in whilst I was sleeping it off, now have to catch up a day late-oh the pressure!
Love to you and all you love- Hope you are off the drips and saline/dextrose infusions- your liver will be suffering withdrawal symptoms!

Thanks for taking the time to let us know you are all right. I feel like I have been holding my breath for days. A word of advice: you may want to wait a little while before you read most of the comments in this thread. You’ve just had abdominal surgery and don’t need to bust a gut laughing right now.

The SMH’s obit for Paddy McGuinness today couldn’t help but refer to “... the formerly CIA-funded publication Quadrant ...”
That aside (a fleeting nod to his conservative period), they seemed happy to claim him as one of their own, now that he’s moved on to the big reading room.P.P. McGuinness Obituary

A good place to go to start getting information would be Gates of Vienna and Brussels Journal.

Please remember when reading folk who claim it’s all “right wing” neo-nazi and what not.

Anyone who stands up against the idiocy of the rabid left is automatically a nazi or fascist.

Anyone attempting to stand up for western culture or national integrity is automatically a nazi or a fascist.

Anyone attempting to stand up against the irrational capitulation to multi cultism in general or islamization specifically, is automatically a racist.

These automatic designations are part of the party approved rhetoric and must not be challenged or allegiance to the Thought Boss structure of complaint peasantry may be called into question and result in required attendance to political reeducation indoctrination.

Lets also not forget that during the ‘30s, the American GOP became infested with adherents to the American nazi party. Scum crops up where ever it can. But because an organization was once infested, does not mean it was always so infested or continues to be so to this day.

And, during WW2, the Allies did join force with the Soviet. Not because we were communist, but because we stood against a common enemy. Sometimes, survival means to find alliances where you can, not where you would rather.

Speaking of hospital food, once when I was in the hospital for a kidney stone, they had me on a liquid diet. Part of that diet was one of those Italian ices, that come in the little cups. But they served it to me completely melted. As if it wouldn’t just melt to liquid on the way down to my stomach anyway.

GoV and BJ are the very ones saying we must join up with the White Power racists or do nothing. They are the LAST ones I’d look to for “unbiased” information.

Charles Johnson’s “crime”, for which he has been labeled a “Marxist” and “traitor”, was not “automatically branding everyone standing up to left-wing idiocy, multi-culturalism, or Islamization a Nazi or a fascist” (nice strawman, btw), but merely asking if Vlaams Belang is the sort of people we should “invite to the party”, given their unsavory history. The violent, outraged reaction he received says more about his accusers than they’ll ever realise.

It was that reaction that led him to delve deeper into the people involved. What was uncovered, any rational person would find troubling, to say the least.

Skeeter, it’s not controversial or disputed at all that they were funded by the CIA. (Actually it was another organisation by name, but same funds). There also isn’t anything remotely insidious about it (unless no one is allowed to spend their money in ways that suit their political views!) and it has been covered at length in many articles including I think an address celebrating their 50th Anniversary and published in that issue.

Skeeter - read this by Leonard Sussman - link.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, providing seed capital is hardly a big deal. If it was an ongoing thing, funded by and editorially controlled by the CIA, there might be some point in making the observation beyond the common slur value.

Skeeter, Quadrant was funded through a CIA front outfit called the Centre for Cultural Freedom, or something like that.
It ought to be pointed out that the funding did not last long and that Quadrant has survived many years now without it. Interestingly, a number of leftist publications such as Modern Times disappeared in the early 90s - not too long after the end of the Soviet empire, the breaking of the Berlin Wall, and presumably the end of Moscow’s handouts.

I’ve been following this since it started. I’ve read both sides of the fight. I find nothing much to support Charles’ side except for the usual bullshit that is always put out by leftists to slather their opposition with the nazi label.

In fact, the neo-nazi movement in europe has officially sided with the islamist. Nazism and islamism have a long history of mutual support and assistance.

Personally, I couldn’t care less. The european attempt to stand up and survive is too little too late and doomed to failure.

An example of how deeply the intellectual inbreeding of rabid mindless leftism has gone is exemplified in the “right wing” label still attached to communism’s socialist competitor in top honors of mass murder ideology of european invention. And the rather idiotic belief that nazis are anything other than just another cluster fuck of brain sick leftards seeking a steady state of compliant peasantry. The only differences are in how the elite is selected and defined and the mechanisms of oppression applied to the peasants in the competing neo-feudalisms.

It is also a wonder that simply wanting to stand up for western culture and national sovereignty is taken as proof positive of rabid “right wing"erism.

But, I’ll just agree to disagree with you on this, because I really don’t give a rats ass, one way or the other. Europe is lost. The people of europe have earned the hell and horror coming to them. They worked hard for it.

The people who think there was anything the matter with CIA funding for Quadrant need to check out the Soviet funding for Australian writers and movements. Not a pretty record but nowhere fully spelled out that I know of.

Re #173. yeah, right, Jimmy, like Lord Goreacle™ is going to give up a highly lucrative gig, one with a total lack of accountability, just to become the President of the United States. Your senility is really starting to stand out, y’know?

Still, if Lord Goreacle™ does decide to voluntarily step down from his lofty status, I am confident that the the CEO of Preservation of Any Climates Organization will be glad to step in for His absence of 4-8 years.

This is my patent: Large (very) hamster wheels, with the axis one metre (three feet) above the arctic ocean, connected to generators. The polar bears will be put in them, one to each wheel. In their desperate attempt not to drown, they will turn the wheel, and thus the generation of electricity will occour. By being only partly in water, the polar bear WILL NOT DROWN when it grows tired and wants to sleep. A special crane raising mechanism can be added to bring P.Bear out of water when it wants to sleep. And, it’s carbon free, thus stopping global warming.

With Rudd’s ALP, could an increase in the GST be ‘weaseled in,’ sometime in the near future? After all, if all goes to form with this type of government and their ‘cuddly politics of collective and no personal responsibility,’ they will need the extra money to bank role their ideology.

#208. o.h.h. you will have to be quicker than that to beat blogstrop (see #179).
Thanks everyone for the help on this. I know a CIA-hating lefty who will be hard at work at his keyboard right now if he has read his SMH this morning.
I needed some ammunition to stave off his inevitable attack on Quadrant.
This same lefty refuses to read anything written by Blair or Bolt because they are, in his view, “right-wing extremists”.
I suppose they are to someone who was once a card-carrying member of the Australian Communist Party, has been a leading union official in the AJA, and spent most of his life working for the AB(f)C.

Shit, he is quick.
In the application of the media to political ends there are two reasons for bias to one or other of the wings. One is obviously to get everyone thinking like you, but the other is the aim of moving the actual centre further towards your favorite wing, so that you can then publish something just the other side of it and boast of “balance”. Articles in the Age this morning on widespread child slavery in the UK makes NO mention of who the owners of these slaves might be. And is it just me or has there been complete silence over the fact that Palestinians are getting through a wall that kept them out of Egypt, and the Egyptians aren’t happy about it? Leave these things untouched and the centre will drift happily left.

Meanwhile, Antony Loewenstein and Irfan Yusuf are devastated by the news. Tim, watch out for any ‘best selling’ authors and portly journalists trying to stand on your oxygen hose. They’ve stolen enough of ours as it is!

230 kae the ironing board went off somewhere under the house. Took up too much room. The corner of the dining room table took its place. Now the dining room table is too full of you know what. Oh dear what a tangled mess we create when seek to do whatever.

#213 kae: These items are typically referred to as “silverware” in the U.S., whether silver or not. I was aiming at metallic accuracy; therefore, I employed the humbler noun. And if a fork isn’t “flatware” because it doesn’t meet someone’s arbitrary standards of flatness, then I daresay a spoon is not “cutlery”, because one doesn’t cut with it, regardless of the accepted utensilary nomenclature of these items in the country in question.

Oh, I know, I know. You will raise the issue of the grapefruit spoon, with its jagged edge, to support your use of cutlery as a generic term that is rightfully inclusive of all of the traditional eating utensils, over and above the merely bladed items. This is specious reasoning, however, inasmuch as the grapefruit spoon, with its heretofore-described jagged edge or lip, is employed rather to gouge, than to cut, in the accepted connotation of that word, id est, to slice with a sharp, straight (straight, mind you) edge.

Now, one might argue that the accuracy of the term “flatware” is merely an assertion made ipse dixit, based on the undeniable fact that the shape of spoons and forks does not coincide in all respects with the two-dimensional manifold of the plane, or flat surface, of the table. And, in a strictly narrow sense, one making this argument would be technically correct. However, the intended meaning of the term, which is clear from a detailed study of its etymology, is to convey the relative flatness of utensils vis á vis the more obvious three-dimensional character of such items as cups, soup tureens and gravy bowls (vide Aristotle’s Physics and Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum VIII).

1. some homeless people are on the street because they have mental illness. Where can you put them? Many of them need attention to make sure they stay on their medication and on the rails.

2. some homeless people have drug dependence/abuse/addiction and that is why they are homeless.

3. many of the abovementioned homeless people suffer from both mental illness and drug addiction or abuse.

4. some homeless people are on the street because they are hiding.

Seome people think that the rot set in when mental institutions were shut down because some bureacrats had a sudden rush of shit to the brain and decided that the the mentally ill could be better taken care of in the community. WRONG. That appears to have been the last straw.
The rot set in when civil libertarians decided that people in mental institutions had rights which could not be abused. The mental institutions were no longer allowed to tell the patients what to do and when, for example, “It’s time to take your medication.”, and “It’s time for you to bathe.” Institutions turned into horrible, filthy places, where they were once well-run and well-kept institutions where mentally ill people were safe from the world and from themselves.

Apparently there is a display in Brisbane about Goodna and Woolston Park Institution.

#236 Stack: The splayd, being sui generis, is still much debated among the scholars of the Academy of Utensils; it was invented by an Australian who obviously couldn’t afford a complete set of flatware - or rather, (with a magnanimous bow to kae) - a complete set of cutlery.

What’s the big problem with men having hairy arms? Non-Chinese manly men are supposed to have hairy arms. Just like forks are supposed to be called cutlery. (That’s me being pedantic, paco, my dear fellow. What fun!)

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